Hasidic villages have top voucher use

Spring Valley may offer fewer affordable homes

Mar. 2, 2013

Loretta Neal of Spring Valley describes adjacent land, shown here Feb. 15 with that land reflecting in a front window of her home. Her family has lived near New Square for 20 years but now she fears her single-family home will be surrounded by high-density housing. / Matthew Brown / The Journal News

Written by

Tim Henderson

New Square is such a popular place to live, despite being one of the poorest places in the nation, that it’s clearing and annexing more land for housing.

Loretta Neal, a retiree who raised a family in a neat brick ranch house just north of the village, always considered it a good neighbor. But as New Square’s dense multi-family housing gets closer to her front yard, she wonders whether the government subsidies supporting it are really fair.

“It’s an effective use of the system,” she said. “But it’s not for the whole community. That’s the part I disagree with, that they say it’s in the public interest, but it’s only for part of the community.”

A Journal News analysis shows that the area including New Square has by far the highest proportion of Section 8 units in the region, nearly half of all its housing units. The top rate in Westchester is only half that high, in an impoverished Yonkers neighborhood east of Nepperhan Avenue.

Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Monsey and Kaser range from 10 percent to 26 percent Section 8, while rates in other poor Rockland areas are a fraction of that: 6 percent to 9 percent in Spring Valley, West Haverstraw and Haverstraw. Rockland has 22 neighborhoods with two or fewer units of Section 8, and 10 with none at all.

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Mendel Hoffman, an advocate for the Orthodox Jewish community, said the Hasidic enclaves of New Square and Kaser have a better supply of affordable housing suitable for Section 8.

“Other places don’t want Section 8. In those villages they don’t mind having Section 8 for people in the neighborhood,” Hoffman said.

Leaders say that’s because it was incorporated just after the 1990 census, making it harder to establish poverty statistics in its early years.

Nearby Spring Valley, larger and more diverse, hasn’t been able to use as many Section 8 vouchers as New Square, even though it has a larger allocation.

In Rockland, there are local housing authorities that control Section 8 directly, like New Square, and also a countywide consortium that handles vouchers for areas without a local authority, like Spring Valley.

Spring Valley residents say low-income housing suitable for the program is hard to find. Linda Magustin, a resident who often helps Haitian-American neighbors navigate housing options, said a woman with a large family had a hard time finding an apartment even after she was approved for Section 8.

“They were only going to give her $1,200 for a two-bedroom, and those are very expensive. We’re not living in Chattanooga,” Magustin said.

The supply of low-income apartments in Spring Valley shrank recently when Avon Gardens, a diverse, low-income apartment complex, announced plans to tear down and rebuild the complex.

Though owners have said nothing publicly about who will live in the new buildings, residents think it will be home to Orthodox families.

By law, Section 8 housing cannot discriminate based on race or religion. Lawsuits have been brought in Valley Cottage and Pearl River against landlords accused of treating potential black tenants differently than white or Hispanic tenants, based on testers recruited to check for discrimination.

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But that kind of testing has never been done in Orthodox Jewish areas, officials said, mostly due to the difficulty of finding Hasidic people willing to take on the role. The county’s Human Rights Commission has not seen complaints from the public about religious discrimination in housing, though the office has cited some local newspaper ads that specified nearby synagogues.

Joe Abate, the county’s Section 8 director, said it’s not surprising that Hasidic areas have the highest Section 8 use because they’re the most impoverished.

Almost 70 percent of Kaser residents live below the poverty line, and New Square is close behind at 58 percent.

Both also have among the largest families in the nation, with 12 to 15 children per family not uncommon.

“If you have 10 kids, you’ve got to be a CEO to pay for everything yourself,” said Rabbi Avrohom Rimler, outreach coordinator at New City Chabad Lubavitch.

“In the religious community, a child is not balanced on a scale with money on the other side. We do not have family planning. God is our family planner,” he said.

Other facets of the Hasidic lifestyle contribute to poverty, leaders say. College degrees are rare, and traditional sources of income like diamonds, retail and real estate have dried up in the new economy.

“It’s an ideology and a lifestyle that leads to poverty. Government benefits is the only way they can make it work,” said Shulem Deen, a Brooklyn writer who left New Square after 10 years. “The Hasidic communities do not provide their members with a very effective means for economic self-sufficiency. It’s a very simple fact.”

Nevertheless, the community is so popular that men are asked to leave unless they marry from within its members, and land is being annexed at the north end around Neal’s house for more housing.

A new upstate community also has been discussed.

“It’s a wonderful community,” said a Monsey woman with close ties to New Square who asked not to be named because talking to outsiders is discouraged. “The amount of giving that goes on between people — in Hebrew the word is ‘chesed’ — it’s more than charity, it’s the goodness. When there’s a new baby, there are 20 ladies making meals.”

Zalmen Rosen, who lives in Monsey and works at a fish market in New Square, said many of his customers are poor, supporting large families while studying religion.

“We try to be happy knowing that in the end things will be good for us. God will take care of us,” he said.